They Hanged My Parents as Traitors, Now the Prince Needs My Heart novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: Why Nobody Asked

Bronwen's POV

"Why are you here?" he asked.

"Because you carved my mother's name."

"Badly."

"Badly," I said. "The E is backward."

"You said to leave it."

"I know what I said."

I slid off the wall into the wet grass.

The stones stood in front of me, pale in the first light, and I touched the one that said MADOC.

The cut was rough and still warm from his hands.

I had not been allowed at the graves.

Aneurin had put a guard on the field for the first year.

By the time the guard left, I had stopped believing there was anything to visit.

"What's in the book?" I said.

"The seal ledger."

"Show me."

He opened it to the page and held it out.

I read the line three times, in the gray light, with my finger under it.

Prince unwell, ring held by the Regent.

The warrant sealed on the sixteenth of December.

He had been out of his head with fever in a tower, and a man he trusted had picked up his ring.

"You didn't sign it," I said.

"No."

"You said you did."

"I nodded when he showed it to me," Cadoc said. "That is the same thing. I'll say it before the packs, if you want it said."

I closed the book.

My hands were not steady.

I was angry in a way I had not expected, because it was hotter now and had nowhere to go.

"You never asked why," I said.

He went very still.

"Say it again."

"My father stood at your shoulder for thirty years," I said. "You said so yourself. You'd have trusted him with your life. And Aneurin put a paper in front of you that said he'd sold you to the north, and you nodded."

"Yes."

"Not one question. Not one. A man you loved was dead, and you didn't wonder why he'd do it. Anyone who knew him would have asked."

"Yes," said Cadoc.

"Say something," I said.

"I have no defense, Bronwen. I've been looking for one for ten years."

"Then I'll tell you what I wanted," I said. "I wanted somebody to say, he wouldn't. I wanted one person in the whole keep to stand up in that square and say, Hywel Madoc wouldn't. Sioned couldn't, they'd have thrown her out. You could have."

My voice broke on the last word.

I hated it.

He didn't come to me.

He stood with his torn hands at his sides and the lantern at his feet, and he let it land.

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